Re: [gnuspeech-contact] Re: Thoughts on GNUSpeech and possible accessibility applications

[David Hill]

Hi Jason,

On Apr 7, 2009, at 5:59 PM, Jason White wrote:

Dalmazio Brisinda <address@hidden> wrote:

The text to speech daemon has been partially ported to OS X. By  

"partially" I mean given text it generates synthesized output, but there 

is currently no intonation (something I intend to remedy shortly) or 

other more sophisticated features. It's also accessible via OS X 

services.

The ability to silence speech very quickly and start speaking a new message is

a particularly important additional feature that would be required for

accessibility applications.

Also desirable is the capacity to track which word is currently being spoken

in text already submitted by the application. Control over such matters as the

handling of punctuation characters (whether to announce them or simply process

them as influences upon the pausing and intonation) would need to be

controllable via the API, as would speech rate and any other tunable

parameters.

You may be interested to check out the paper that describes the "Touch 'n Talk" system that Dalmazio mentioned in an earlier email.  The direct link is:

http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~hill/papers/ieee-touch-n-talk-1988.pdf

it is an item on my university web site to which you can also navigate.

I wish it were all up and working right now.   It was very disappointing to lose it, along with all the other stuff we had developed, when NeXT went belly up but getting it up again is one of the goals towards which we are headed.  It would meet (and hopefully exceed) the requirements you have started to outline.

[snip]

All good wishes.

david

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David Hill

address@hidden

http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/gnuspeech

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